Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.

Fear and bigotry don’t need explaining. They simply are, like traffic jams and taxes.

International aid as a means of development is a major failure, and not just in Haiti.

I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it.

You're a public menace. You shouldn't be allowed out on your own.

Remember that you have a choice in what you see. If you choose to see a person's darkness, you strengthen your darkness within. If you choose to see their light, you shine from the inside out.

When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.

We begin to make the plan known to our children when we hold tight to the iron rod ourselves.

May Allah show mercy upon the man who shows me my faults.

When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist.